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Everything posted by Ghost+Nymeria4Eva

Go on, give me examples of male characters based on sexist stereotypes that George Elliot, Lionel Shriver, Anne Rice, or Jo Rowling wrote then, each.
What is wrong with you? You are twisting everything I wrote.

Lol, I so didn't say that. Dany orders 163 of them executed, I even quoted the passage, like where the hell is this even coming from? It's obvious that there's a lot of them if Dany managed to find 163 to execute to match the number of children they killed.
Say what? No I said Dany punished them based on collective guilt, rather than collective punishment. Collective guilt means people of a certain group that undertakes an action as a group are responsible for that action. Meaning, if this action was a crime, then all are collectively guilty. Collective punishment means punishing people who are associated with someone who is guilty, like family members or friends. The OP there was arguing that Dany was meting out collective punishment, and I disagreed because the GM are not random people in Mereen, but the rulers of the city.
You do realize that how we apply morality now doesn't apply to how people in ASOIAF apply morality? Like we don't behead people, but they still do and so on.
The GM of Mereen naturally would have points of disagreements. But they agree broadly on being slavers. So why would you go out of your way to say that oh no, some of these people wouldn't be a-ok with killing slave children? We don't have any reason or details to show that anyone dissented. Dany blames the Grand Masters, not individual GM, and there's nothing saying that the kids were killed by so and so, and not GM as a whole.
As I said before, Dany doesn't execute them because of associating with Grand Masters, because as GM they are collectively guilty of the action. I wanted to make this clear bc some people were arguing that Dany randomly executed a bunch of Mereenese slavers, but that's not what happens.
I'm certainly not a historian. Feel free to point out exactly where I'm historically wrong about slavery in the American South. I was writing based on what I remember from school and college.

You are. You conflated collective punishment with collective guilt. And definitely didn't understand the simple sentence in the context it was written. Or maybe I'm the idiot. I think I'm arguing with an 8th grader in the middle of the night.

That is a very interesting what-if scenario to consider. Doesn't make it what happened, but what if.
1. The Great Masters. 2. The Great Masters. 3. Not a single mention in the books of any GM dissenting, walking away, or coming over to Dany's anti-slavery side.
These are all great what-if scenarios to consider. Really, what if people who have been cruel slave masters for centuries suddenly cared for the well-being of children they enslaved?
I tried to explain how the collective guilt thing works here, given that there's no details in the narrative about the what-of scenarios you mention. I get it that you want to consider individual guilt. I simply don't agree because the GM are the group of rulers of Mereen. There's nothing to show that what Dany does is wrong in this world. It's certainly stupid, given that Dany should have sent them all to prison or something, considering that they are all guilty and continues to engage in slavery-type behavior.

Here's the quote from ADwD:
The Great Masters are the rulers of the city. They own the pyramids and run the slave business and the city. There's apparently a whole lot of them. They make up an oligarchy that makes decisions for Mereen like the Council does for Westeros. So the GM are not random nobles.
The point is GM came up with the idea to kill slave children to make Dany fearful of them. It was their war defense strategy that backfires on them. When Dany overtakes Mereen, she wants justice and vengeance for the dead kids. The GM killed 163 of them, so she kills 163 GM. This is called eye-for-an-eye justice, as in it's proportionate to the crime committed in the medieval sense.
She doesn't nail a bunch of rich people in the city just cause she's feeling mad. And no one in the books anywhere calls GM innocent of this particular crime. You can show me the quotes if I'm wrong.

1. The Grand Masters are a group, not one person. They are like a members of a corporate board, or more specifically, the rulers of an oligarchy. So how do they come up with ideas? Someone obviously has an idea and others show support for it, else the idea is shot down. That's simply how groups work. You don't have to assume anything. Individual endorsements of ideas, as you say, is not a sure thing of course. But when a group takes an action, that means it has universal or majority support, or otherwise they wouldn't do it. If someone doesn't like it, they can leave the group. Anyway what I'm trying to say is that all members are responsible for group action that benefits all members.
2. I mean they actually executed the plan. They ordered their underlings to go crucify the kids to teach Dany a lesson. It happened.
3. I mean if the plan worked, as in deterred Dany from her warpath. If it did, all the GM get to keep their slaves and land without risking their safety. So regardless of who liked the plan or not, if it worked, every single one of them would have benefited without a doubt. That's just how group action works.
4. Yes we do. The idea was to scare Dany, but it backfired. Of course each GM would have benefited if Dany hadn't sacked Mereen. Why would there even be a doubt about this? Did some of them secretly want to be conquered and executed for their sins? That's just far-fetched speculation not worthy of considering here.
As I explained before, collective guilt and proportionate revenge. You seem to go with the individual guilt thing, which I don't agree with here because we are talking about a group that takes singular action. I think you are trying to say that GM are part of a team and maybe some members of the team decided to go crucify the children. Like during Robert's Rebellion when Tywin orders his minions to kill Rhaegar's children. Ned doesn't know about it or endorse it, though other rebel leaders do. If Dany had killed two rebel leaders, including Ned, to exact proportional justice, that would be wrong right, given that Ned had no knowledge of it?
But the great masters of Mereen are not a hastily put together group that works from different parts of Essos. They are more like the Council that oversees Westeros. That's what's in the books, that they are the ruling class. So when the council takes an action, the members can't pretend to be ignorant of the actions, as they are responsible for coming up with them.
In the books, Dany says in her POV chapter the GM is what's responsible for the children's deaths. Not some GM or one GM, but just GM. So Dany orders an equal number of them executed to match the number of dead children.
To go with the original point you were trying to make, how does Dany's this particular action in Mereen somehow make her a bloodthirsty tyrant? She didn't do it on impulse or accuse random people of child murder. She pinpointed to the guilty group and took an action that the time and place deems proportionate.

@asimetrikal
Dragons or any flyer can cover bigger landmasses because even if they do tire, they can just make stops on the way. They can't do the same when they are crossing oceans.
In AWOIAF it's strongly hinted that dragons did come to Westeros in ancient times, given the weird stone structures that resemble Valyrian stuff forged by dragonfire. And there are bones of dragons found all over the known world, even in Westeros.
They are magical and have special magical connections with the rider. That's why only people with the blood of old Valyria can ride them, and no one else. Hints in ADwD that dragon control is related to the rider's will connected to the dragon magically. But these are just possible suggestions. When the rider wants to rest, the dragon might stop therefore.
I'm not sure dragons with riders get airborne without them "most of the time." Dany's dragons do because she doesn't keep them in a dragonpit, until ADwD at least.
In any case, there are no mentions of a dragon ever tiring in the books. Dany's dragons do sleep, but when they fly and play, they don't get tired. In descriptions of Aegon's conquest, it doesn't come up either. Like Aegon doesn't have to change his battle plans because Balerion needs rest, you know, like a horse. There's one story of a rider, Nettles, riding a dragon far out into the sea. They are never seen again, so a maester speculates that the dragon might have gotten fatigued and crashed out there somewhere in the ocean. But there's a lady in ACoK in the Vale mountains that some people say is Nettles so the dragon might not have crashed after all.

Right I get it. You want to emphasize individual culpability in an action taken as a group, in which case Dany just executing 163 without a trial or even a questioning would be totally wrong. I'm trying to say that they all share collective guilt, even if the idea came from just one guy. The others endorsed it, went through with it, and had it worked, everyone would have benefited from the action. So in this sense Dany's decision to hold all of them guilty is not wrong. Therefore, her eye-for-and-eye punishment wouldn't be wrong either. She makes the GM suffer proportionately (technically) to the slaves and their children.

Like I asked before, why should we consider that slave master's were not equally guilty? We have a specific crime and a group that committed it. Dany executes 163 members of that group in an eye-for-eye style revenge attack. What's there in the books to suggest that they were not all guilty of the crime all the same? What gives that some masters spoke against crucifying the children or somehow thought it was morally wrong? I thought going eye-for-eye was wrong, but I don't get why we should consider any of the GM that got executed any less deserving of the guilt. You used the term collective punishment before. I'm going to use the term collective guilt here.
And I think Dany realizes later that some guilty people have gotten away with it. That's why she considers going even far to punish them. Dany doesn't execute the whole group in question here, just 163 to like match the crime. That's on par with medieval, ASOIAF justice. I mean she could have executed them all, but doesn't.
(And anyway wasn't what they did like general practice in Slaver's Bay against slaves who resisted the masters? Not sure though, but I think so).

Ok maybe I should have differentiated between the general members and the military ones. The point is, the Great Masters here are the rulers of the city. Why would you assume that any one of them would be ignorant of the crucifixion of over a hundred children? They are not passive watchers, low ranking members of a family that happens to own slaves, wives or cousins of the slavers, but the slave masters themselves. That's like suggesting the many members of the top ranks of the Nazi Party were ignorant of the Holocaust. That's like suggesting any member of the Nazi party was ignorant of it. As you mention, Schindler was a party member too. But he did save people as he could, which the Allies became aware of. If there was any slave master actually against slavery, wouldn't the slaves have informed Dany, so she could have allies inside the city? Of course not, it doesn't happen. There's nothing in the books to suggest we should question their guilt. We can question Dany's actions, but that's a different matter.
So Dany has good intentions in wanting to free people, but the outcome of those intentions--liberating slave cities--is bad? It's bad that the slave-based economy is slowing collapsing?
You may not realize it but defending slavers is exactly what you are doing.
If you think GRRM is trying to show that good intentions have bad outcomes in Dany's arc in Slaver's Bay, you are wrong. He's trying to show that war doesn't win everything. Once Dany defeats the slavers, things don't naturally resort to being rosy for Dany or her cities. Mereen and Astapor don't become shining beacons of freedom overnight. To do that, Dany has to rule. And she's learning that building something is far more difficult than destroying something.
She realizes that she made a mistake in Astapor, which is returned to the slavers after she leaves. She wants to make it right in Mereen. She's supposed to fix challenges even a US Congress with hundreds of members couldn't effectively solve.
You can look to Ned's arc to find out that good intentions don't justify bad deeds. He doesn't commit crimes against humanity in his POV chapters, but he does screw up big time. His intentions are always honorable though, but it goes badly for everyone, especially Ned. Also, Robb. Doesn't turn out as intended either.

The Nazis were a party. Lol.
Grand Master is an official title given to slave masters with political power. It's in the books that Grand Masters rule the city. If Dany killed Grand Masters' friends, family, chess buddies, etc, then it would be collective punishment. She orders the deaths of 163 officials who would undoubtedly be responsible for the decision to kill those children, even if they are not the ones who went out there and hung the bodies on the crosses.
They probably meant make it personal against Cersei, not the people in KL. She burns KL right in front of Cersei's eyes, and slowly moves in on the Red Keep. Then again, these might have been more empty words from D&D.
I don't remember my history lessons exactly, but I think all Nazi party members were considered guilty, even today. The Nuremberg trials were just a formality to punish the top ranking officers. Most Nazis died in the war, some fled, others cut deals, etc. Banality of evil and all that. Don't they still arrest WWII Nazis, as geriatric as they are now? You nab them and ask them what they did, and voila, you have the charge. You do know that every single Nazi committed a crime, right? They didn't just sit around at home and have nothing to do with the Holocaust. That why they went to WAR and shot everyone wearing the uniform. If Churchill ordered his officers to grab 163 top ranking Nazis and execute them for the Holocaust, would he have committed a war crime? Would the guilt of those officers ever be in any doubt? No.
Because slavery in ancient times was not practiced the way it was in the US, and how they do in Slaver's Bay. People were enslaved by war or debt in ancient times, and for most cases could liberate themselves. There was no legislation to call them subhumans. Also the slaves in the US came from many different ethnic groups and tribes. African isn't a single "race." Slave-based economies are very much American, and that's what GRRM shows in Slaver's Bay, right down to the Reconstruction.
Yes, dude, slavery is bad. Doing something against it with the right intention is always good, even if the person doing so is otherwise bad. Most people who want to portray Dany as a potential tyrant just simply refer to the brutality of the punishments she metes out to the slave masters. They don't double down on defending the slave masters like you are doing here. You can't call Dany bad when her intentions are good.

Oh I've definitely seen this convoluted line of whining against Dany being anti-slavery. Oh no she didn't bother to find out which of the slave masters were bad enough to crucify kids. Seriously? That's like asking which Nazis were okay with the gas chambers. They were Grand Masters and the government that makes decisions like crucifying children is made up of them. Besides, that's definitely not what collective punishment means. A modern term, it refers to punishing people simply because of association with a guilty person. Not at all what you refer to.
That is just a THEORY. Some people speculate that Dany burned KL because smallfolk were guilty of supporting Cersei. The writers are not being cryptic here. Dany burned KL because she was mad.
I knew it. This always comes up when US slavery is mentioned. And no. The slavery in ASOIAF is not based on "thousands" of years of slavery in the world. It's based on slavery in the US, not in the Aztec empire (where slaves were war captives and were not called only one-third human). If you think saying that Dany was wrong to free enslaved people because in real life most enslaved people chose to live that way, you need to get your head checked.
Let me make this clear: slavery is wrong. Dany was never wrong to defeat slaver empires. If people feel queasy about her actions in Astapor or Mereen, that because of the brutal punishments she copies from the slavers, not because it was wrong to destroy their empires. Dany is still better than the slavers, morally and otherwise, even after she kills the 163. That's how it is.

How do you know it was the "vast majority" that ended up alive and not the minority? Because there were millions of slaves in the US? How many millions were taken out of the African colonies? How many ended up jumping ship or killing themselves?
Dany was right to kill the slavers (though she could have chosen a more humane method). If the US government had done it with the Confederate generals, their supporters, and every single slave-owning estate owner, this benevolent slave master ideology would not exist today. And thereafter no Jim Crow. GRRM fixing history in his books.

The point people trying to make is that the show-runners callously used rape as some plot device to give Sansa character. There are other women who get raped, like Dany, Cersei and Mel, but not in the context that's necessary for character growth. You can go ask women who end up in rapey marriages whether their ordeals lead to character growth.
As I said, they don't get punished directly for their sins, but those things are what leads them to the point of losing limbs and body parts.
Why do you insist that it was wrong on Dany's part to execute slavers by the lot? Why do you keep calling it collective punishment, suggesting that some of them were only guilty by association or some type of ethnic basis, and not by their actions?

Not talking about Dany's actions in KL here. I wasn't comparing that to Ned's. I was replying to that poster going on about how brutality is brutality regardless of intentions, relating to Dany executing slavers in Slaver's bay. Read the previous threads please.
Regardless of what you think about animal-human lives in real life, in the books, killing the direwolf has serious consequences for Ned Stark.
This is unbelievable. No one chooses to live as a slave. Not being enslaved is not a principle, it's a HUMAN RIGHT. And yes, people did choose to die rather than be slaves. They jumped off the slave ships and committed suicide in captivity. People in bondage took drastic steps to free themselves because it is worth all that.

You mean like how it was after the Civil War ended, when the defeated Confederate supported didn't want to accept the former slaves and humans and citizens? It pushed black people into poverty and resulted in mass migrations to the north. Not to mentions the lynchings that came after.
GRRM has said before in interviews 'what does it mean to rule wisely?' (paraphrasing here). Like after Aragorn wins, how does he become a good king? Dany wins a just war, but ruling afterwards is anything but easy. That's what GRRM is showing here. You can't win a war overnight, but bringing about genuine change takes longer than that.
Btw the plague, starvation, war, and death as you say is the fault of other slaver cities wanting to defeat Dany. They bring troops to destroy her anti-slavery regime, throw diseased bodies over the walls to plague the freed people, and Sons of the Harpy distracts from economic reform. None of these things are Dany's fault but the slavers who want to keep slaving.
You cannot seriously suggest that being a slave is better than all this? Would it have been better in the US never to have had an emancipation proclamation because it would have, what, not caused lynchings?

Anti slavery advocates in the US as far as I know did not directly benefit from it. As in, there were no slave owners or slave owning family members that one day rose up and said, hey, kidnapping people and keeping them in bondage is bad. You could say all white people in the US at the time benefited from slavery indirectly, with money from the slave economy ending up as stocks on Wall Street. So some of the white activists who wanted slavery gone were technically slavers? The biggest anti slavery advocates have always been former slaves, like Frederick Douglass of course.
Regardless, there nothing to indicate that there was any such resistance to slavery at freaking Slaver's Bay. If so, when Dany shows up, they would have voiced their opinion. Resistance to slavery in known Essos exists only in Braavos. And they would have supported any resistance or reform movements if such existed on Slaver's Bay.
I highly doubt anyone was happy that the slavers got horrible punishments for their crimes, I certainly didn't. But anyone with an ounce of common sense would rejoice when Dany defeats the slavers. Dany is better than her enemies in Slaver's Bay. She isn't a slaver, deals out punishments only for the truly guilty (the slavers), and doesn't enslave people even though that would make her really rich and powerful. And by Yunkai law the slavers set up themselves, the bloody punishments would be just, like beheading of the deserter was just under northern law.

What are you talking about? She picked members from the SLAVER social class, as in they were all engaged in and were benefiting from slavery directly. What reformers? Are you trying to say that the some of the people who got rich off slavery were trying to reform it, meaning dismantle their way of life? I think you are just really sleepy now.

Noncombatant is someone who is not in combat as a soldier. As I said, Ned follows the law in this case. But it's still brutality as you described earlier. Under the law, the nightwatchman might not be innocent. But Lady was. He knew Sansa lied, doesn't correct her, kills Lady, and dies exactly as the wolf did, at the Sept of Baelor no less. That's like divine justice.
Dany didn't kill rando elites, she killed slavers who were never going to change their ways. She conquered Yukai and time for serious reform has come. If she really wanted to be an evil tyrant she would have enslaved the former masters.